Wow that theregister article has really stirred up a hornets nest in the comments of the campaign.

What I never understand with these campaigns that go way over their funding and fail is how they cannot get production up and running with the excess of cash they made to at least sell some extra units to use the profit to fund the backers units.

This is why I always thought the iCP2 was dodgy, they asked for $150k, received $209k but still ran out of money.

Because more hardware is more production time. If you are a new company, looking to buy yourself in, with an amount of money already known, that is way worse.
All of a sudden it is not your game to play, and not that many companies will even compete for your order.
Being a few trusted people may not scale that well, there is a lot of shipping to do for example.

For an ideal amount of units, many overshoot it and underestimate the extra workload in return for supposedly better volume deals.
If that was tangible, it would be an order of magnitude more, and that makes it a whole different game to play.

A new upstart is not going to have the smoothness to not lose that edge somewhere else.

Maybe I was a bit hasty eating my own words, it appears they had twenty 3D printed prototypes (3 working) made a while ago that they've been using for various photo shoots and video's.

Someone has posted that these are the ones in the above photo as they have noted matching damage from a previous photo/video.

I really do find it strange that every photo / video that is supposedly showing a working version has to be so contrived, what's with the teaser video, why not show a video of someone booting it up, loading & playing a game / demo.

if that's true, maybe he doesn't even know that the project's gone to shit or he's still on his way to the office, rolling down the street with that half-egg tricycle... idk, but personally it'd bother me a lot if a shady scam-like campaign was attached to my name, and i'd smash the whole thing as fast as possible (or kick the creators' butts so they get their stuff together).

What I never understand with these campaigns that go way over their funding and fail is how they cannot get production up and running with the excess of cash they made to at least sell some extra units to use the profit to fund the backers units.

Click to expand...

I've seen quite a few campaigns "fail" (for a definition of fail which includes taking several YEARS longer than anticipated*) because they get way more money than they expected and think they need to spend it by improving the product in some way: switch to a 3D engine; add more LEDs; extend the story; use a more powerful CPU; etc... In every case the sudden influx of cash was a surprise for the developer, so they hadn't actually planned to make these changes, they just decided that since they have the money may as well go for it. And then those "simple" changes turn out to be more difficult than they'd anticipated and it either takes a much longer time to get to market than it would have if they'd just gone with the original plan, or in the worst cases just burn out completely.
That's what I recall happening with the ICP2, something about having enough money to get different LEDs, LEDs that proved to be a huge problem, dragging the project out further and further until it just died. And there were other issues, of course, but Craig's insistence on getting the LEDs he wanted instead of accepting it wasn't going to work and going back to the original design was at least one major nail in the coffin.
The only reason I'm not actively freaking out every time ED talks about wanting the Pyra to be "perfect" is because he's said many times the design goals are fixed, the perfection is just in tweaks to what already exists, not major revisions. If he suddenly came out and said "yeah, we're changing to a USB-C" or something I'd be extremely nervous, no matter how mild the change seems to be.

Modifying things can be harmfull, but in the end of the day, it's usually the peoiple running the thing and really not planning or biting of more than they can chew. There is no way LEDs should have brought down the ICP2, and that certainly wasn't really it. I think the nubs couldn't be supplied in the end or something like that from what ED once said. But again, it really came back to somehting else - and I think you know what that is.

Look at the GPD WIN, they litteraly changed the shit out of that during the campaign, still successfull. And most camapigns change things , they still deliver.

The common thing I've noticed though with failed campaigns, is that the people behind it a lot of the times - not always - bit off more than they can chew.

I think you missed the point. Ian asked, and I answered, why a company that made significantly more than what it sought could fail. Yes, there are many reasons a campaign might fail, but by and large the reason I've seen for failure when they bring in way above their goal is feature creep.
A prominent example of this would be Broken Age. Double Fine sought to make a modest game with a modest goal of $400'000. They brought in over $3 million. Suddenly Tim Schafer is talking about being able to do so much more now that they have the money. And "so much more" very nearly cost them everything. In the end the game was years late, and only had the first chapter. They were counting on sales of that first half to continue funding to finish the second half. Even though they did eventually succeed, because of how long it took and the fact that it was actually incomplete on delivery marks it a failure in my mind. Star Citizen is another good example. They wanted $500'000. They got $2 million. The game is now years late, still in development, and is a different game from the one I expected when I backed it 5 years ago. Is it a better game now for the amount of money it has, and the amount of time and effort they've put into it? Probably, but it doesn't change the fact that it is almost 3 years overdue and still no where near what they promised in the kickstarter.
It should be obvious that the GPD Win was a special case. I wouldn't be surprised if they fully expected to make changes along the way and, as professionals with several devices already under their belt, knew exactly how much extra to buffer just in case.

On the iCP2, according to the timeline, it was indeed the LEDs and Craig's insistence that they go through with it that killed things. Looking at the updates now.
#19, November 2012: The board as it was is complete: it's basically just the bottom half of the Pandora. Craig was experimenting with keyboard backlighting, but confessed that it may not work and that they would have to get to production soon so they may go with the backlitless one.
#21, November 2012: Backlighting is working but Craig wants to go that extra mile and make them RGB LEDs, if he can.
#22, December 2012: Craig claims success, the RGB backlighting looks great.
#25, January 2013: Thanks to the new LED backlighting they had to change the case and the keymat. Shouldn't be a big deal, eh?
#26, February 2013: This is where everything starts to unravel. Redoing the case moulds is turning out to be more of a headache than the previous update would've suggested.
#27, March, we're fine, everything is fine. How are you?
#30, April, production of the board is slow because, surprise, RGB LEDs are harder and more expensive to source than single colour variants. Unspoken but inferred is that he's decided to go ahead with board production despite not having completed the modifications to the case and keymat.
#34, August: Boards are done! But the new keyboard is way more difficult and expensive than the original. Didn't expect that, didn't plan for it. Case mould redesign is still a problem.
#36, November 2013: Craig gives up, will start to issue refunds if at all possible.

The important take away is that the board was finished and ready for mass production in November 2012. The case mould was complete even long before then. They had a fully functional prototype with a real case, a real keyboard, Craig demonstrated it many times in many pictures and videos. Everything was ready to go, and then "what about a backlit keyboard?" happened, and the unintended redesign dragged on, and on, and on, with unforseen results and costs. If he'd stuck with the original design we'd all be using our non-backlit but infinitely less imaginary iCP2. If he hadn't produced 1250 boards with RGB backlighting before the new case and keymat were completed, he could've reverted to the old, non-backlit design, and only lost several months of work. Instead he pushed ahead with the new feature without thinking it through and lost everything.
And that is literally how I see all these campaigns that get too much money fail: by trying to expand the scope because they can, because they have the money, then expanding it too far and breaking.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not talking about general failures in kickstarters, I'm not saying that every kickstarter that greatly exceeds its goal is destined to failure, I'm simply saying that those that do fail after exceeding their goal seem to have this same trend in common: feature creep. And even those that do succeed, many of them only just barely do so. Feature creep kills projects.